Other banned words include any that allude to wealth (which might make kids jealous) as well as poverty, divorce, and disease. The Department of Education maintains that this is not censorship.
Should we also ban current events in the classroom? Surely, the news stories contain these banned words.
In an extreme case of political correctness, New York City has recently created a list of words that will be banned from New York State tests. You might be thinking that perhaps the words might be slanderous or even elude to atrocities, like slavery, and while words pertaining to slavery have indeed made the list, words such as ‘birthday’ and ‘dinosaur’ have also been banned.
The reasoning behind the word ban is that educators believe that the identified words “could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students.” My Fox New York reports the correlation between the words and why some might object to their use:
Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays are not celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism. Even “dancing” is taboo, because some sects object.
The forbidden topics were recently spelled out in a request for proposals provided to companies competing to revamp New York City’s English, math, science and social-studies tests. In a request for proposals to companies that are currently competing for the job to rewrite the city’s state tests, the requirement that specific words be purposely left out has been very clearly outlined, “Some of these topics may be perfectly acceptable in other contexts but do not belong in a city- or state-wide assessment,” says the proposal.
[…]
